The purpose of this paper is to discuss Kunzru's novel in the context of Zygmunt Bauman's theories concerning "liquid modernity". The article focuses mainly on the exploration of fears which haunt modern man on the individual and collective level. The main character's act of transmitting a computer virus is seen as an act of protest against unequal treatment and economic exploitation, expressing fear of exclusion, becoming a social outcast and a "wasted life". In the consequence of the global chaos, which ensues when Arjun Mehta loses control over the virus, the protagonist's position changes: a Third World immigrant worker is turned into a global terrorist, thus reflecting Western society's fears of the Other, who may introduce destabilization and be a cause of a "collective catastrophe". Finally, it is argued that the novel comments on modern man's condition of uncertainty and a decreasing ability to predict the consequences of one's actions in the globalizing world.
A b s t r a c t. The goal of this article is to discuss the use of history in Bharati Mukherjee's short story "Orbiting" from the collection The Middleman and Other Stories (1988). It is argued that Mukherjee refers back to the controversies that accompanied Italian immigration to the US at the turn of the 20 th century in order to provide the background for the present day immigrants (the post-1965 wave), and challenge the view that their assimilation is impossible. The historical context of American attitudes towards the so called "controversial" European immigrants is provided. The essay makes also use of sociological concepts of the Dillingham Flaw (Parillo) and assimilation (Alba and Nee).
The purpose of this article is to focus on the issue of marginalization of South Asians in the United States as portrayed in two novels written by writers of Indian origin: Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine and Chitra Bannerjee Divakaruni’s The Mistress of Spices. It is investigated how race or skin color are the reasons for the marginalization of Indian immigrants in the United States. While Jasmine shows white Americans’ inability to embrace the racial difference of an Indian immigrant, which may be read as a reflection of the relative newness of this ethnic group in the United States and its shifting racial classification, The Mistress of Spices shows that the patterns of marginalization based on skin color may be developed already in the homeland, India, and then transferred to the US and confronted with the country’s racial diversity. Divakaruni’s novel raises a discussion of how the appreciation of whiteness developed in the country of birth leads to the hierarchical relations between the members of the Indian diaspora, and how it affects their relations with other American minorities. In this way, it shows that marginalization based on skin color is not only the outcome of inter-ethnic encounters but it can be an internal problem of this ethnic group as well.
A b s t r a c t. Bharati Mukherjee's novel Jasmine has been frequently criticized for the Orientalizing representations of Indian women and India, which can perpetuate the stereotypical dichotomy between the East and West (violence and barbarism vs. peace and modernity). However, the analysis of the bidirectionality of gaze in the narrative, that is, the Westerners' Orientalizing gaze cast on the protagonist (female immigrant from India) and, more importantly, the protagonist's gaze back on Americans, can lead to a conclusion that reading the novel in terms of binary oppositions is not valid. In the very act of looking critically at American reality the protagonist denies the stereotypical image of an Oriental female (passive, silent, obedient). Moreover, a variety of representations of India and America are brought to the fore with a particular focus on how the image of America as the Promised Land is challenged.
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